Sensationalist, yellow journalism.
- Shock value, not substance. It’s never actually news.
- Focuses on some freak act rather than issues of national importance (or even more general importance)
- They do it because they know that if they focus on what life is really like, they’ll lose ratings / sales
- Not helpful to me because it never introduces a new topic, it only rehashes old, classically shocking topics: abuse, fighting, impropriety, some type of vice that’s supposedly exciting because it’s hidden.
- Am I trying to be unaware of my surroundings? No. But I heard about kidnapping when I was little. I don’t need to see every gruesome detail of it. It’s enough to know it exists.
- Will watching it improve the quality of my life or of others’? The answer is invariably “no.”
- We greedily try to steal the grief of the people involved. Instead of acknowledging some wrongdoing, asking if there’s anything we can do, and moving on, we gobble up hours and hours of TV coverage, investigations, speculation until we feel that the burden is OURS because we (1) have nothing else to do and (2) have a sick need, as a society, to punish ourselves. Why is it not enough to know that there is evil in the world and be thankful it rarely touches us?
- And that’s why I don’t watch the news.
parasol party 